Genres have characteristic features that are known by, and recognized by the audience. This 'formula' is reproduced again and again. For my short film horror, the recognizable conventions, which include characteristics such as costume, setting, characters and situations, will all help the audience recognize that the genre of the short film is horror. Producers of generic horror narratives depend on a certain amount of immediate communication with the audience, that's why I've interviewed my target audience, in order to establish and recognize what expectations they want to be met, when watching a horror. As the role of the Producer, I want the narrative to be easily comprehensible to the audience, and to ensure this I will stick to, and use, key components of horror genre, with semantics such as characters, locations, props, music and significant shooting styles. The relations between theses elements that structure the narrate in my chosen genre of horror (the syntactic) should be obvious to the audience from the beginning, the audience should immediately expect at the start of the film a fairly stable equilibrium, and the lead character is suspecting that she is being followed, then a disequilibrium as the antagonist is established, and this leads to a face paced chase scene, followed by a brief moment of suspense and anticipation as the protagonist escapes and ponders at the enigma of if their escape was actually successful. Genre is not set however, it is fluid and defined by the audience, which is why I need to interview my audience in order to familiarize myself with how they perceive horror films, and what they expectations they are wanting to be met.
Representation Theory.
Representation refers to the construction, in any medium, of aspects of 'reality' such as people, places, objects, events,cultural identities and other abstract concepts. The term refers to the processes involved as well as to it's products. For instance, in relation to the key markers of identity - Class, Age, Gender and Ethnicity (the 'cage' of identity) - representation involves not only how identities are represented and constructed within the text but also how they are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also deferentially marked in relation to such demographic factors. For mine and Cassie's short film (aimed at a fairly young demographic) I need to take into consideration how the main protagonist will be represented, I need to ensure that when my audience watches my short film, they have a preferred reading and don't disagree with mine and Cassie's ideologies. To achieve this, we have taken popular aspects of mise-en-scene, camera, sound and editing in order to make the representations feel natural and unmediated. In a film, the director wants the audience to be on the side of the protagonist and hope that the antagonist will fail. This means that the audience has to identify with the protagonist – they have to have a reason to be ‘on his/her side’. But directors only have a couple of hours to make you identify with the protagonist – so, they have to use a kind of ‘shorthand’. This is known as typing – instead of each character being a complex individual, who would take many hours to understand, we are presented with a ‘typical’ character who we recognize quickly and feel we understand. To ensure this me and Cassie interacted with our audience demographic, in order to establish crucial concepts that would represent our antagonist and protagonist in such a way, that the audience would immediately side with the protagonist. The typical horror stereotypes that have been idealized by society and reused constantly in horror films over the years, are a 'ditsy' blonde, innocent looking woman protagonist, and a dark haired, pale faced with a partially covered face. These representations have been used frequently, in films like Paranormal Activity and The Grudge, the audience is immediately sympathetic towards the female protagonist as she is faced with an opposing force, which is the desired result for mine and Cassie's short film.
Audience Theory
I need to ensure that my media text is heading in the right direction, i.e. my target audience, and I need to know how they will respond to my text. There are several effects models (theoretical explanations) as to how an audience ingest the information of a media text. The Hypodermic Needle Theory suggests that the audience passively receives information, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. The information passes into the mass consciousness of the audience unmediated, and this suggests that as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and are behavior can be easily changed my the media makers. It assumes the audience are passive and heterogeneous. Therefore I need to ensure that there is nothing in my film that could be seen as promoting violence or anything else that could be interpreted as offensive. The Two Step Flow Theory was created to prove that the mass media has not reduced the population to a mass of unthinking drones. Instead, Paul Lazarsfield, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet conducted a variety of social experiments, and their results showed that information does not directly flow from texts into the minds of the audience unmediated, but it's filtered through opinion leaders who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm. The Users and Gratifications Theory (1948) suggests that media texts have the following functions for individuals and society; surveillance, correlation, entertainment, cultural transmission. This was expanded later on in 1974 with the added functions of media texts; Diversion, Personal Relationships and Personal Identity. The Reception Theory extended the concept of an active audience further, in the 1980's and 1990's a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading. This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognized codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means.
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